Politics as Worship: A new take on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

Plus the MENA Academy'sWeekly Roundup of new academic research #11, all in one place.

I had been planning a new piece about Israel and Gaza, but that may appear elsewhere; one way or other it should be out soon. For now please enjoy your weekly roundup of new research on MENA political science, including a new book review essay!

Sumita Pahwa, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers. Syracuse University Press, 2023.

There’s been a lot of great research on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood over the years; I’ve been guilty of contributing my fair share. Just off the top of my head, outstanding recent books include Nathan Brown’s When Victory is Not an Option; Carrie Wickham’s The Muslim Brotherhood; Victor Willi’s The Fourth Ordeal; Khalil al-Anani’s Inside the Muslim Brotherhood; Marie Vannetzel’s The Muslim Brotherhood in Society; Steven Brooke’s Winning Hearts and Votes; Abdullah al-Arian’s Answering the Call; Hesham Sallam’s Classless Politics (reviewed here); and Abdelrahman Ayyash and Amr Effifi’s Broken Bonds (reviewed here). Scholars have examined the Brotherhood’s history, political strategies, institutional design, religious outreach, social services, moderation and radicalization, relationship with jihadist movements, and so much more. So what’s left to say?

Sumita Pahwa’s brand new Politics as Worship succeeds in finding a way to advance our understanding of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by diving deeply into a wealth of its internal and public literature, as well as decades of public statements and rhetoric. Her question is deceptively simple: what do Muslim Brothers think they are doing when they do politics? It changes over time, she finds, in response to political openings and closures and the nature of the political challengers they confront. But in other ways, she finds remarkable consistency: political action is a form of ethical engagement and religious activism, regardless of electoral outcomes or other conventional indicators of political success or failure. Taking seriously their own views of their political agency and action offers an important challenge to conventional analysis of Islamist politics, while enabling important new perspectives on some of their otherwise puzzling political choices.

Pahwa’s historical narrative spans the nearly hundred year history of the organization, from Hassan al-Banna’s foundational years and the dark days of Nasserist repression through its return to the public realm in the 1970s, electoral engagement over several decades, and ultimate failure in government from 2012-13. In each era, she plays close attention to the language they use (in the original Arabic) when talking about their political mission. What emerges is a perhaps remarkable consistency in these orientations. Pahwa sees more continuity through different historical eras, less of a gap between discourse aimed at its membership and at outside/Western analysts, less of a generational divide, and less of a divide between the “political” and the “religious/dawa” parts of the organization than is often assumed.

That isn’t to say that there weren’t debates within the organization, that ideas from the wider Islamist world didn’t circulate, or that edicts from on high were automatically obeyed. On the contrary, Pahwa unearths a fascinating history of discussions and debate — often aimed primarily at an audience inside the organization — over the very meaning of politics and the value of political engagement. Those debates have taken on fascinating new forms in the wake of the experience of the the Brotherhood in power between 2012-13 and the subsequent military coup which unleashed exceptionally brutal repression which has largely (and perhaps irrevocably) shattered the organization (as Ayyash and Afifi so brilliantly document).

Politics as Worship gives an outstanding, well-written, and novel account of these debates which will benefit both veteran students of Islamist movements and newcomers alike. For more, please listen to our recent podcast conversation here:

And now for your weekly roundup of new articles about MENA politics from the academic journals:

Fiona Adamson, “Migration governance in civil war: The case of the Kurdish conflict,” European Journal of International Security 8, no.4 (November 2023; originally online June 2023). ABSTRACT: This article examines the management and instrumentalisation of migration and mobility as an area of contested governance in civil wars. Building on work in migration studies and rebel governance, it shows how migration and mobility regimes form part of the structure of violent armed conflicts, as both states and non-state actors seek to control processes and consequences of mobility and migration to their advantage. Governance of migration during conflict involves the strategic use of mechanisms of migration governance for the purposes of achieving conflict aims. This article develops a framework for understanding how migration governance is instrumentalised in civil war as a means of managing and controlling populations. The framework is then applied to the case of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and beyond through an analysis of three areas of migration governance that have played significant roles in this extended regional conflict: forced migration and refugee governance; border management; and diaspora engagement. The analysis provides a challenge to dominant state-centric, securitisation and humanitarian approaches to migration and security by pointing to the political and spatial complexity of contested migration governance in situations of protracted conflict.

Marwa Shalaby and Scott Williamson, “Executive compliance with parliamentary powers under authoritarianism: Evidence from Jordan,” Governance (November 2023). ABSTRACT: When are executives in authoritarian regimes more likely to comply with formal legislative powers? Building from theories of authoritarian power-sharing, we argue that executives will be more likely to respect legislative prerogatives when protests or elite organization increase the ability of legislators to undermine the executive's political position. We evaluate this argument by analyzing novel protest and legislative data in Jordan between 2010 and 2015. In line with our expectations, we find that parliamentary queries were more likely to receive the required response from the cabinet during months of higher protest activity and when they were submitted by MPs from Jordan's only well-organized opposition bloc in the parliament. This study extends the burgeoning scholarship on authoritarian legislatures by contributing to understanding of executive-legislative interactions under autocracy and providing new insights into the conditions under which these legislatures are more likely to influence decision-making processes.

Yazan Doughan, “The Rule-of-Law as a Problem Space: Wāsṭa and the Paradox of Justice in Jordan,” Comparative Studies of Society and History (26 October 2023). ABSTRACT: This article explores structural entanglements between the rule-of-law, as a globalized aspirational horizon in post-Cold War politics, and corruption, as a highly salient malaise, by way of an ethnography of wāsṭa, an institutionalized practice of patronage in Jordan, and a salient object of corruption discourse in recent years. The article follows wāsṭa and anti-corruption practices in various sites where wāsṭa is most salient and most problematized and situates the contemporary practice in relation to historical transformations in Jordan’s political economy and global discourses on justice and development. While globalized anti-corruption discourses pit practices of patronage and brokerage like wāsṭa against the rule-of-law, an ethnographic and historical view illustrates how the latter is the condition of possibility of the former, the framework by which it is diagnosed, and its presumed cure. Thus, I argue that the rule-of-law should be understood as a historically specific “problem space” that posits corruption as a prime diagnostic of the ills of state and society while generating practical paradoxes and a perpetual sense of temporal out-of-jointedness for “developing” countries.

Inga Kristina Thrauthig and Guy Robert Eyre, “‘Quietist’ Salafis after the ‘Arab revolts’ in Algeria and Libya (2011–2019): Between insecurity and political subordination,” Mediterranean Politics (29 October 2023). ABSTRACT: Revolutionary movements, like Salafi-jihadis, often capture public attention. However, as scholars of Salafism have long argued, quietist Salafis are the largest sub-group within, and in many ways the true heart of, Salafism in the southern Mediterranean and beyond. This article has two aims. First, it provides scholarship on Salafi groups in Libya and Algeria not tied to jihadi milieus. Second, it contributes new understandings of Salafi developments in two less-studied countries, namely Algeria and Libya. Via a comparative study of one prominent type of quietist Salafism, known as Madkhalism, in the post-2011 contexts of political transition and civil war (Libya) and limited political liberalization (Algeria), we show that whilst some Libyan Madkhalis partially constrained their rejection of taking up arms or of alliances with ideological competitors, their Algerian counterparts did not. We build on existing scholarship by explaining this divergence at the level of discrete political opportunity structures, both since and prior to the events of 2011, together with intra-Salafi framing competition and core quietist ideological convictions. Overall, we argue that Madkhalism has partially seen a bottom-up-driven shift over the last years that is likely to continue, further reshape the movement, and impact the countries in which its acolytes are embedded.

Altea Perocili and Federico Donelli, “Qatar's foreign aid and political strategies in the Horn of Africa: The case of Somalia,” Global Policy (26 Oct 2023). ABSTRACT: The purpose of this article is to analyse the relationship between Qatar's foreign policy and foreign aid in the Horn of Africa (HoA), with a particular focus on Somalia. Since the 2017 blockade, the HoA has become increasingly important to Qatar's foreign policy and aid efforts, intensifying political and economic competition with other Gulf players. This research describes Qatar's foreign policy strategies and tools in the HoA from 2011 to 2021, observing the evolution of humanitarian aid interventions in Somalia and the impact of Gulf competition in the country. The research aims to combine neoclassical realism with small-state theory in the analysis of foreign aid, examining Qatari foreign aid interventions in Somalia as a foreign policy tool for exercising autonomy and as an outcome of the Qatari elites' decision-making process.

Boris Samuel and Beatrice Ferlaino, “The power of price subsidies in Morocco,” International Sociology (26 October 2023). ABSTRACT: The Moroccan system of ‘compensation’ subsidises products that are deemed to be important for household purchasing power: butane gas, flour, bread, sugar, and fuel (until 2015). This article offers a historical sociology of this system, which was inaugurated during the colonial period in 1941 and which survived criticism from neoclassical economists working in international financial institutions. It demonstrates that the system’s resilience and the transformations it underwent can be analysed by treating it as a means of exercising power. Subsidies make it possible to involve private actors in governing social issues. It also helps to regulate economic and political rivalries and alliances through market interactions and competitive relationships, including around the King’s Palace. The administrative mechanisms used to calculate the subsidies and the retail prices also shape the relationships between operators in the various sectors, while allowing opaque and rentier management. In addition, despite being the subject of social demand, the compensation system has been criticised by technocrats and protest movements, particularly after the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions in 2011. The article is based on an analysis of the practical procedures of compensation in the contemporary period, in particular concerning flour and bread, and to a lesser extent butane, as well as on an analysis of the debates and struggles that subsidies has given rise to within Moroccan society, its State administration, and its political parties.